Archaeological Forgeries

“None of the experts who have scrutinized the specimens and
the gravel pit and its surroundings has doubted the genuineness of the
discovery.”

— William Gregory, in Natural History reporting on the
Piltdown Man fossils

There’s really no big secret to Archæological Forgeries. If
you dig up something that looks old and obscure, you can tell all sorts of
stories about it and people will believe you — if you have the
trappings of authority (and sometimes even if you don’t).

Of the many
petrified people
who have (been) turned up over the years, the granddaddy of them all is the
famous 3,000-pound hunk of
gypsum known as the
Cardiff Giant.

My favorite part of the story is when
P.T.
Barnum fails to obtain the rights to display this fake prehistoric
fossilized giant in his museum, so he has his own version carved and
displays it as the original!

More sophisticated, but in the same vein, was the “Piltdown
Man.” A fossil skull “discovered” in Britain (actually
fabricated from a human braincase and a chimp jaw) was believed to be the
missing link that would support the then-current theories about the origin
of humanity. The scientific establishment welcomed Piltdown Man into the
family tree of our species, and it took forty years to uncover
the hoax
and to start correcting the textbooks. The responsible party never
confessed and remains unknown, although everyone seems to have a pet theory.

One of Japan’s most accomplished archæologists,
Shinichi Fujimura,
was recently
caught on film
planting relics in the pre-dawn hours. A lot of cherished Japanese
archæological dogma now must be reëvaluated.

More recently, the University of Frankfort’s
Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten
got caught making up his data on the age of Neanderthal skulls.
“‘Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago,’ said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax.”

The Kelsey Museum of Archeology has put together a nice collection of fake
phæronic antiquities in an on-line exhibit called
The Art of the Fake
and The Fakebusters show you
how it’s done.

Dr.Hohann Beringer had a
feeling that God had manufactured fossils just to use up excess creative
energy (in opposition to the more accepted view nowadays, that they are the
impressions of long-dead creatures). He was amusingly willing to theorize
about any carved up rock that was planted at his digs, which gave the grad
students in his crews something to do with their excess creative
energy. The wonderful
Beringer’s Stones
included impressions of “Hebrew characters, [and] the figures of a
winged dragon.”

That reminds me of the fascinating fossils of Homo
sapiens miniorientalis that were discovered by
Chonosuke Okamura.

When allegedly historical artifacts are also religious relics, things get
turned up a notch or two and you end up with such phenomena as the
discovery of Noah’s Ark, and the endless ballyhoo surrounding the
Shroud of Turin.

Don’t get me started about the mountain of bullshit
that has been piled higher than Mount Ararat in an attempt to
“scientifically” prove the version of divine
creation found in Hebrew mythology. It’s not polite to make fun of the
mentally ill, and it’s especially unwise when they outnumber you.

Joseph Smith was probably not the first person to invent an archæology
in order to found a religion, but his Book of Mormon takes the
cake wherever cake is served, spawning counter-hoaxes in the form of the
Kinderhook Plates
and
so forth,
and
ongoing attempts
to shore up the original story with further pseudoarchæology.

More recently, an ancient
ossuary
was discovered that allegedly once contained the remains of “Jacob
son of Joseph brother of Jesus” according to the (faked) inscription.

Grins to the folks at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, who created
an exhibit called
“The Centaur Excavations at Volos”
complete with a centaur skeleton from the excavation. For more on
invented creatures and monsters and aliens and such, check out our pages on
Cryptozoölogy.